


exactly what you deserve

by dCryptid



Series: perfect match [4]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 01:20:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9358562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dCryptid/pseuds/dCryptid
Summary: “All that money. All that time. Gone. Just gone. Wasted. Fucking wasted.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: this probably won't make any sense if you haven't read the rest of the [perfect match](http://archiveofourown.org/series/552103) series, so you should do that if you haven't already. this is the final chapter and epilogue.
> 
> if you HAVE read the rest of "perfect match" - this is what I've been promising all along and I really hope it's a sufficient apology for the horrors I have wrought <3

            From this position and altitude - the L1 Lagrange point between Pandora and its largest natural satellite - Elpis was both terrifying and beautiful. Its barren, cold surface was marred by a patchwork of cracks, jagged lines intersecting with broken concentric patterns and imperfect spirals. The web of fissures glowed in fiery shades of red and orange, casting a hot, sick light across the visible portion of the moon’s surface.

            Usually, Jack reveled in the view from his office window. The distant hellscape was magnificent and unholy, a pulsating, lava-soaked testament to every terrible thing that mankind was and could be. When he was ensconced in his chair before it, his silhouette cutting across the moonscape like a god’s shadow falling over a wrath-scorched land, even the most stalwart of men cowered before him. And then he’d smile, teeth just visible against the ruddy backlight that lined his form, and everything fell into place exactly as he decreed it.

            But today, the grinning god in the golden throne was absent. In his place was a darker, brooding Jack, chair turned to face directly into the scarred landscape that usually formed his backdrop. The lights in the office were turned low, leaving him mostly in shadow, but a red glow highlighted his knuckles where they whitened against the arms of his chair.

            He was hunched, immobile but straining, like there was something inside him pressing at his every seam, threatening to split him open, to match him to the fury-cracked moon below. If Elpis was a symbol, a reminder of what Jack was capable of, today it was redundant; everything it stood for was clear in the twisted snarl that had worked its way across his face.

            When the door hissed open, he didn’t react; only one person was authorized to enter his office right now, himself aside. Heels clicked on the floor as she approached, steady, authoritative. Her voice was flat and emotionless when she spoke. “What.”

            Jack gritted his teeth, drawing a deep breath through his nose. “He’s gone,” he growled, voice so low that it was almost lost in the cavernous space that surrounded them.

            Nisha’s tone was sharper, and it echoed harshly against the ceiling. “Who’s gone?”

            A shudder ran through him, and he shrank in on himself, shoulders tucking up around his ears, head filled with the horrible squealing of bone on bone as he ground his teeth. “ _John,_ ” he spat, uncoiling like a whip as the name snapped out of him.

            He could make nothing of Nisha’s silence.

            “How?” she finally asked, and he followed the sound of her bootheels as she circled the desk, coming to stand next to him. “I thought that you could track him. I thought-” She cut herself off as she knelt, her hand resting on his forearm.

            Jack kept his eyes trained on Elpis. “All that money. All that _time_ ,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Gone. Just gone. Wasted. Fucking _wasted._ ”

            “How?” she repeated, and the noise that started low in his chest was barely recognizable as laughter, rumbling outwards like thunder, rippling down his limbs like an earthquake as he shook with maddened, furious humor.

            Slowly, he rotated the arm her hand rested on. His hand was clenched into a fist, and one by one his fingers uncurled, revealing the object he’d been holding tightly enough to dent his skin - small, irregular, electronic, stained with dried blood. Some of it had flaked off, settling into the creases in his palm.

            There was something written on the casing, and Nisha gently took his hand and turned it so that the hand-scrawled lettering better caught the light. Jack didn’t have to read it to know what it said; once had been enough. Her fingertips tightened on his wrist.

_Fuck you._

            “It was at the base of his skull.” Jack’s voice was choked, snarl and mirth indistinguishable. “Don’t know how he knew - how he found it - how he got it _out_ \- can only assume the face is gone, too, and that he didn’t blow himself to kingdom _fucking_ come doing it, because _this_ -” he closed his fingers around the tracker again - “was on my fucking desk when I got in this morning.”

            “It could have been someone else. Someone got to him, cut him open - wouldn’t surprise me, he was an idiot-”

            Jack held up his other hand, thumb curled in against his palm, fingers outstretched. “Four people are authorized to be in here after hours. Four. Wasn’t me; you know where I was. Wasn’t you; I know where _you_ were. And I’d eat my fucking hat - your hat - _someone’s goddamn hat_ if it was Wilhelm.” One by one, he tucked three fingers down to join his thumb. “That leaves one.”

            He could feel Nisha’s eyes on him, but didn’t return her gaze.

            Settling back into his chair, his shoulders relaxed just a fraction. “I should have known better,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I really should. But thought I had him.” His fists tightened again, even as he shrugged. “I _did_ have him.”

            Slowly, he raised one hand to his face. Having performed them so few times before, his fingers were unfamiliar with the motions, fumbling at the polished silver clips that bound the mask to his face at the temples and chin. One by one they came undone, with soft clicks that seemed to fill the room in the relative silence. When they were free, he pinched the bridge of his nose, releasing the last set of clasps, and pulled the mask away.

            The arch of the scar across his face was almost graceful, the unmistakable contours of the vault symbol only slightly distorted by the way they were forced to cross the topography of his features. All the same it was ugly, twisted, the edges of the deep indent puckered and rippled, one corner of his mouth pulled up where the flesh had healed unevenly and drawn taut. Stained a rich blue by some alien means, the red and orange light cast by Elpis’s volcanic cracks turned the scar a sickly, blackened purple, a dark valley splitting his face into two unequal parts.

            Jack dropped his hand back to the arm of his chair, the mask dangling carelessly from his fingers. His blind eye twitched helplessly in its socket, flickering around in fits and starts, desperately seeking input. “I thought I had him,” he repeated again, quietly.

            Nisha gripped his arm, and he could feel the fury in her trembling hands. “He couldn’t have done it alone. Someone helped him.”

            He laughed, a short, derisive bark that contained absolutely no humor at all. “Of course he had help. Springs, probably, though it could have been anyone he was friendly with down on that armpit. Or someone on Pandora, even - the Vault Hunters, maybe Athena. Or Moxxi.” He laughed again. “Wouldn’t that be the fuckin _shits._ ”

            “We’ll find out,” Nisha hissed. “Make ‘em pay for it.”

            “What would be the _point?_ ” Jack snorted. “It’s not like he could do any real damage - some kid with a hacked-up face and a hole in his head, wandering around the collective shitheap that is Pandora and its general vicinity - ten, no, ten _thousand_ bucks he’s dead within a week, without me looking out for him.”

            “Still,” Nisha persisted, “it’s the principle of the thing. You can’t just let them, let him get away with it.”

            Annoyed, Jack shook her hands free of his arm. “You’re missing the point,” he snapped, pushing himself up out of his chair and striding towards the panoramic window that looked down on Elpis. “It doesn’t _matter_ if I track him down or not, because in the end…” He spread his arms, embracing the fiery scene before him. “In the end, they are _all_ going to pay. Every last one of them, on this reeking death trap of a moon, and the rotating trash pile it orbits.” His hands dropped to his sides, one still clenched into a fist, the mask dangling from the other.

            “I wasn’t joking when I said I was gonna cleanse the planet in fire, sweetheart,” he murmured, almost affectionately. “Everything is already in motion. No matter how bad that little _punk_ -” a barely restrained shudder of rage rolled through him- “fucked me over, I don’t have the time to take out of my day to go hunt him down.” He opened his fist, and the little electronic tracker fell onto the floor, crushed almost beyond recognition. “He’ll die with the rest, and he doesn’t deserve anything better than that.”

            When he turned around, it was like he was almost himself again, Elpis cresting behind his head, hiding the scarred ruin of his face in shadow. He _felt_ like himself again, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to smile.

            Nisha, who had remained crouched by his chair, rose to her full height as he approached. Jack’s free hand landed on her waist, and she rested hers on his chest, looking up at him with arched, curious brows.

“I know I can’t stop you if you want to go kick his ass on your own time,” Jack said, “but really, it’s not like we _need_ him anymore. R &D’s got the holo-projector working almost perfectly - slap it on any old guy and bam! Instant me. Until he dies, of course.”

            Her hand came up, and he resisted the impulse to twist away as she ran her fingertips along his cheek, lingering on the nerveless, marred edges of the scar.

            “It’s not so bad,” she told him, noticing his reaction.

            “It’s pretty damn bad,” he replied.

            He turned back to Elpis and held the mask up, scarred face to false one. Red light shone through the one open eye socket, tinting the white surface of his blind eye crimson.

            “He was the last reflection of the man I used to be, you know,” he said after a long moment. “The photos, the videos, gone. I made sure of that. But underneath this…” His grip tightened on the mask. “It was my face. Untouched. One last little indulgence.”

            Putting the mask back on was a much smoother process than taking it off, clips fitting neatly into their slots, edges pressing flat along his jaw and forehead. He blinked several times, clearing his vision, then turned back to Nisha. Despite his best efforts, he only managed to summon a ghost of his best smirk. “Suppose I should have gotten rid of him a long time ago.”

 

___________________________________________

 

            Timmy shielded his eyes as the shuttle took off, battering him with the flurries of dust cast up in its wake. He watched the craft lift into the air, getting higher and farther away at a rapid pace until it was lost in the bright glare of the Pandoran day.

            He adjusted the duffel slung over his shoulder as the dust settled around his practical, battered combat boots. Five minutes on this planet and the cuffs of his secondhand cargo pants were already caked with grit, but it was worth it. It was all so far beyond worth it.

            Running his hands through his hair - cropped short, tousled by haste - he couldn’t help but grin, even as his head and face throbbed with barely subdued pain. There had been concerns about typical quick-healing methods causing his body to reject the modifications, so Nina had encouraged him to let everything heal as naturally as possible. Didn’t stop him from being doped to the ears on painkillers, though.

            He touched the bandage at the back of his neck with careful fingers, traced the line of his jaw, pushed his knuckles up under his cheekbones, nibbled at his bottom lip.

            Through everything, he had never imagined that being free would feel this good.

            It wasn’t perfect. His hair was still brown, face still longer and more angular than he remembered his own being, eyes muddy from a botched pigment swap, but it felt more like _him_ , and that was everything. There were even a few faint freckles across the bridge of his new nose.

            His fingertips found the circular scars at the tip of his chin, small reminders of everything he had gone through. They were tender to the touch - it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Nina had wrenched the pins from their holes, scraping the bone as they came free. Timmy faintly recalled screaming in pain, and dropped his hands. Anesthetics, aside from being only for “big babies,” were reserved for people who didn’t need to be on their feet and running the second their procedures were done.

            Twelve hours since he dropped the tiny tracking device on Jack’s desk and walked out for the last time.

            Worth it. All worth it.

            Timothy Lawrence hitched up the duffel bag again, pulling his stained flak jacket tighter around his body. He was free, but he wasn’t safe; he was on Pandora, after all. But he was armed and he was dangerous, sporting a full complement of battlefield skills and an armory to match. He tapped through the storage deck strapped to his thigh, selecting something with sleek lines and a name written in orange, and hefted the familiar weight in his hands.

            The new metaphorical backbone felt good, too.

            Gun at the ready, he strode off into the badlands.

**Author's Note:**

> BRING BACK TIMMY FOR BORDERLANDS 3 2KALWAYS IT'S LITERALLY THE ONLY THING I WANT IN LIFE
> 
> honestly the only thing I regret at this point is that it took me almost t w o years to get all these pieces posted. I am the garbage can. (could I have put all these pieces into one multi-chapter work? yes. why didn't I? because the time scale felt ridiculous.)
> 
> (also I finally get around to trying to submit this and the server was down. it's fate i tell you. the world never wanted me to finish this.)


End file.
